A report from a prominent economist finds that the number of permits to carry concealed handguns has skyrocketed by 178 percent in the last eight years, even as the murder rate has dropped.The figures, cited in a study by the Philadelphia-based Crime Prevention Research Center, is evidence that legally-possessed handguns deter crime, rather than contribute to it, according to the center's president, John Lott, an author and Fox News contributor who has held teaching and research positions at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Yale and the University of Chicago. He said the huge increase in the number of permits issued to allow law-abiding Americans to pack heat shows attitudes toward firearms are changing.

In 2013 following the Aurora theater shooting and the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, Democrats in the state Legislature narrowly passed new laws requiring universal background checks and banning magazines that hold more than 15 rounds. At the time, Colorado was the only state outside of the Democratic Party’s coastal bases to have passed such significant measures.

Not many guns nor much ammunition is sold in San Francisco, but Supervisor Mark Farrell wants to record those transactions.He’s asking the city attorney to draft legislation to require the video recording of all such commercial sales in the city, as well as require businesses to give the Police Department weekly updates on their ammunition sales.

Bloomberg’s “The Trace” reported this week “breaking news” that anti-gun researcher David Hemenway has “debunked” the myth of self defensive gun uses in America. Of course, this “breaking news” amounts to nothing more than another failed attempt by Hemenway to challenge common sense and shared experience here in the United States. Hemenway has been trying (and failing) for nearly two decades to undermine the groundbreaking work of Florida State University’s Gary Kleck, which showed that firearms are used approximately 2.5 million times per year in self defense situations. You can read Kleck’s most recent response to Hemenway here.